When is the right time to seek out funding?

I’m someone without a hoity pedigree building a company with limited connections in the funding space. Thus far I’ve put my head down and focused on building and proof of concept through intreviewing people and “selling” companies/people on to the services offered on my platform – which has gone incredibly well. In your opinon, when is the right time to seek out funding? I’ve commited 20k so far. Could committ 10k more. I can stretch my runway but some funding would help things along. My vertical is a 2.5B national market and there is a peer-to-peer component which is not represented in the market which I’m going to change and then grow the vertical cap. I’m in the final stages of releasing the beta version.

Additional questions …

With a market size of 2.5B & 80M in my metro (which is what we’re going after for beta) what kind of growth would you like to see month-over-month? Any thoughts on a 6 month goal for users/income?

Is there another metric that investors like to see in their analysis?

Answer

Get your product live with users (not totally sure where you are starting based on your question) and try to show something like 10% week-over-week (yes, weekly) growth on some number. Users is good, active users is better, revenue is even better, recurring revenue is the best. Do it for 10 weeks and then try to raise a small seed round.

10% weekly growth looks like this (100 is a placeholder for wherever you start):

Week 1 – 100

Week 2 – 110

Week 3 – 121

4 – 133

5 – 146

6 – 161

7 – 177

8 – 195

9 – 215

10 – 237

AMA #1

Experienced angel investor, invests in an average of 5 companies per year. Current founder and YCombinator alum.

Comments

There is no single best answer to this. Depending on the type of funding (family, incubator, angel, crowd, government, VC) you will have to be at a different stage with your company. Depending on the relevance of the investor to what you are doing the deal dynamics may vary. Depending on how desperate you are to raise the money the deal may lean against you.

However, if you can demonstrate your product’s viability in terms of market size, validated demand, ability to execute on the idea, team credibility, a bit of traction etc then you have a very good chance of raising from most of these groups.

Having said that, if you can avoid fundraising, I would recommend to avoid it for as long as possible. Hold off and build your business to be the best it can be.

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